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They can no longer claim group membership, since their frame of reference has been displaced. This destabilizing movement must continue, not only for the king and queen but for their subjects as well, otherwise their social evolution will once again stall.
The Sirian Experiments is the report of Ambien, a senior administrator, regarding the colonial project of the Sirian empire, a colonialism which is inter-galactic in nature. Whereas initially Sirius fixes its identity between the poles of the indigenous natives and the planet Canopus, Ambien’s continual questioning of her relation to the Other results in the realization that, first, the colonial experiments are unnecessary and second, that Sirian identity is interdependent with the Other in the largest sense, not something apart to be defined in dialectical fashion. Ambien’s insight does not come quickly; she must start at the beginning, as a member of the ruling elite with all of its preconceptions, and go all the way through her formation as a social critic, struggling at times with ideas that she only partly understands. While she is rewarded with greater insight regarding concepts like “necessity” and “wholeness,” she is ostracized by her Sirian peers as no longer one of the Five, and sent away to corrective exile, much like Charles in Briefing.
Like Ambien and the Link people, or the narrator of Memoirs or the king and queen of Zones, the representative of the title of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 must look beyond the current situation, in this case the physical extinction of the entire population of a dying planet. The residents of this formerly peaceful planet fall away from the utopian ideal as soon as their conditions begin to deteriorate, much like the situation in Memoirs. Fear is predominant, competition for ever-scarcer resources begins, defensive groups form and violence rises. While waiting to die, the key characters literally change their identities as necessary, as a function of the group’s needs. While it is difficult, these people try to understand why they must resist the idea of a closed identity.